In this, we first explore the evolution of heterogeneous networks and the candidate technologies for augmenting network reliability, including PLC, MoCA, Wi-Fi and Ethernet. We then turn our attention to power-line communications. We discuss high-bandwidth and IoT PLC applications, standardizations, and specifications. Finally, we present the book organization.

Chapter 7 returns to the smart home as a way of examining the collected world challenges that will arise for information privacy law. It reviews the multidisciplinary literature on privacy risks in the smart home. It then highlights that sensor data collections are different in nature to the type of data collections envisaged by the control model of information privacy. Smart home sensor data collections are circular and continuous, which challenges the basis of rationality modes of consent provision, through privacy policies. Moreover, the very notion of control is challenged in boundary dispersed environments, such as the smart home, which are essentially fragmented and contested. These factors give rise to significant challenges for the control model of information privacy law and its focus on the process of personal information exchange.

Chapter 3 examines the implications of sensorisation in the smart home. The smart home is chosen as a collected world case study for several reasons. First, it is a site of dense sensorisation and thus a good space to explore technological infrastructures that belie the smart world. Second, it is one of the prime sites of sensor data commercialisation, including the new business models that are developing. Third, the home is a legally protected idyll of the ‘private’ and it plays a cherished role as a space of autonomous individual growth in liberal societies. The chapter details the complex data generation anatomy of the smart home and examines it from its sensing, reasoning and intervening processes. Even though the smart home is framed as a space of seamless technological experience, its infrastructural anatomy is fragmented and multifarious because it includes multiple data collection devices, diverse collection pathways and involves several different infrastructures. Chapter 3 concludes by highlighting that sensor data is key to the operation of the smart home and the business models that are now starting to develop.

Chapter 1 outlines the book’s coverage. Part 2 sets the conceptual and legal framework from which the collected world consequences of Part 1’s analysis can be examined, particularly in relation to sensor data collections from the smart home. Part 3 then examines the consequences of the collected world and the challenges it will bring for information privacy law’s dominant control model and its manifestation in information privacy laws predicated on process protections. In doing so, it puts forward a reformulated role for information privacy law based on Julie Cohen’s work of the last decade, most notably, on modulated power.